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Privacy Statement
Partnering With the Best
Our servers are located at Inflow in NW Portland, one the country's premier Internet data centers, with a record of 100% uptime. Inflow has spent many millions of dollars on its Portland facility, assuring against earthquakes, fire, flood and other natural and human catastrophes. Inflow provides us with a protected and secure environment for our network and computer equipment, including uninterruptible power supplies and backup generators, fire detection, raised floors, HVAC, separate cooling zones, humidity and temperature control and high levels of physical security. They also provide us with a variety of carrier network connections directly to our servers. Inflow's communication strategy routes traffic over multiple paths to maximize our Intranet reliability and redundancy in the event of a single-network failure. You can find out more about Inflow, Inc. at their public web site: www.inflow.com.
Speed of Access
High-speed access is an obvious key to having a responsive web site. With Inflow, Prescient leverages Tier 1 OC-12 connectivity and private peering relationships with some of the largest network and content providers.
Reliability
Reliability is essential for providing uninterrupted Internet service. If a provider has only one connection point and that Internet line goes down, then all web service is interrupted. Prescient's colocation provider utilizes redundant lines, delivered via a fiber ring.
Since information on our web servers is changing constantly, we conduct daily tape backups. On a periodic basis, dump tapes are stored off site in case disaster precludes loading from a regular backup tape.
In the event of a power outage, both battery and generator power backup are provided by our colocation facility.
Prescient's System Administrators can receive alpha-numeric pages and are on call 7/24 (every day, 24 hours per day) in the event of a system failure or service interruption. Remote monitoring services are conducted externally from two separate sources, using a provider specializing in this service. Paging services are national; however, at least one qualified technician is in proximity at all times.
In the event of catastrophic failure at the colocation facility, Prescient's development server is available as a redundant server and is fully capable of intercepting all traffic. Prescient's server is located in its corporate office and has its own arsenal of security and stability resources, with RAID storage, redundant power, UPS, and SMP architecture.
The Domain Name System (DNS) is a distributed Internet directory service. DNS is used mostly to translate between domain names and IP addresses, and to control Internet email delivery. Most Internet services rely on DNS to work, and if DNS fails, web sites cannot be located and email delivery stalls. At Prescient, we administer DNS internally, allowing for instant alterations. For redundancy, primary and secondary DNS servers are hosted on remote networks.
Security
Prescient Software recognizes that privacy is a major concern for most people and that many are apprehensive about submitting or sending personal information over the Internet. We consider Internet security to be a top priority. We have implemented rigorous security measures on our Internet systems that are compliant with the most recent developments in secure transaction standards.
At Prescient Software, we believe maintaining the integrity of the software and web sites we deliver are as important as ensuring their availability. We take all necessary and appropriate steps to secure our Internet applications and we take great pride in the security of our Intranet applications. Physical security of our servers, partitioning developer access to the servers, encryption of all remote administration, and software security are all carefully safeguarded to prevent unauthorized access.
Prescient's System Administrators and Development team consider server and network security as an integral part of each aspect of development and server administration. A variety of security advisories are routinely monitored, kernels are kept up-to-date, patches are applied, services are monitored and settings are refined. Prescient's technical staff takes great pride in its security expertise and experience. Members of our staff have been involved in the pioneering of online banking and brokerage services since the mid-nineties, and in fact built the first web site for Columbia Funds.
For both administrative access for agents and secure application forms for customers, Prescient uses the strongest encryption available -- The Thawte SuperCert with 128 bit SSL encryption. Thawte is a VeriSign company. Sensitive data that is logged in the database or emailed, is PGP encrypted.
Scalability
Usually the best thing that can happen to one's web site is that it becomes wildly popular. But then the issue becomes, can the server and network infrastructure meet the increased demand? By selecting Inflow as its high caliber colocation provider, Prescient is able to easily and quickly arrange for the addition of bandwidth to our servers.
Prescient and Inflow also monitor both the servers and the Internet connections so that any traffic or congestion problems are fixed well before customers know about it.
Experience
Experience does count. Every member of Prescient's technical team has at least five years of experience in Internet services management, web site development and/or Internet server administration.
Reporting
All web site activity is logged, and reports are generated daily. This not only allows Prescient and affiliate partner marketing staff to measure customer response, but also provides additional tools to aid our technical team in predicting future demands on our networks and servers.
Updated December 2004
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